Scientology threatens Wikileaks over secret cult bibles

From WikiLeaks

The Scientology cult, of which Hollywood actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta are the most familiar public followers, has threatened transparency group Wikileaks, demanding that it remove "unpublished, copyrighted" Scientology documents. The Scientology documents, which were released by Wikileaks last month, are restricted from the public and low ranking cult members.

The March 27 letter, from the cult's Los Angeles lawyers, Moxon & Kobrin also asked, in an apparent attempt to trace the source of the materials, that Wikileaks preserve any related records, "..not limited to, logs, data entry sheets, applications -- electronic or otherwise, registrations forms, billings statements or invoices, computer print-outs, disks, hard drives, etc.". However, the Wikileaks site, by design, keeps no logs of its submissions, or even of its readers.

The cult's lawyers presented Wikileaks with a list of copyright registrations for its secret "religious technology" made with the United States Copyright Office and some examples of international court cases related to previous Scientology legal attacks on publishers. These examples reveal part of a long history of reported Scientology abuse of the legal system and are clearly aimed at putting pressure on Wikileaks to remove the content.

The documents, according to the legal letter, are owned by a Scientology holding company, the Religious Technology Center (RTC), which claims ownership of the "confidential Advanced Technology of the Scientology religion" — the secret "bibles" of the cult.

The content, consisting of typed as well as hand-written pages by the cult founder, the late science fiction writer and con-man L. Ron Hubbard, describes OT "levels" I-VIII as well as related "NOTs" and other aspects of cult dogma and operations. The public is usually introduced to the cult through its "free stess test" stalls, L. Ron Hubbard's book 1950's pseudo-science book "Dianetics", or fronts such as Narconon, Criminon and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. Cult members are normally thoroughly indoctrinated before they are introduced to higher level Scientology "bibles", such as "OT-III", which describe all human problems as having being originated by the evil galactic overlord, Xenu, some 75 million years ago. While parts of the material have appeared previously, if briefly due to legal action, others parts appear to be original to the Wikileaks release.

After reviewing documentation of Scientology's endless assaults on journalists from Time
magazine and CNN, which spent over $3 million defending against
just one of their suits, to investigative freelancers who have had
publishers pulp their books rather than facing litigation costs,
we have come to the conclusion that Scientology is not only an abusive cult, but that it aids and abets a general climate of
Western media self-censorship.

If the west can not defend its cultural values of free speech and
press freedoms against a criminal cult like Scientology, it can
hardly lecture China and other state abusers of these same values.
Such states are quick to proclaim their censorship regime is no
mere matter of protecting cult profits, but rather of national
security.

Wikileaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than Wikileaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, London Banks, Russian off-shore stem cell centers, former African Kleptocrats, or the Pentagon. Wikileaks will remain a place where people of the world may safely expose injustice and corruption. Indeed, in response to the attempted suppression, Wikileaks will release several thousand pages of additional Scientology materials next week.